They’re being penalised for doing business with an ad company that allows the ultra annoying adverts.. Those running the adserver, i’d hope, would be influenced if more websites took their business elsewhere (such as to google’s, which is strick on not being intrusive).

oh, and as to flash – i don’t trust it. Adobe (and before them macromedia, which I’m concluding had the same dev team) have a horrible security track records. Not only do they make the most basic mistakes, but they make them over and over.

Enabling flash on a case by case basis (i.e. only when i want to view the content) is a very good idea. Leaving it running by details, with the potential for all those security holes, isn’t good practise.

I encourage people to only install flash in one browser. (maybe in opera, while using firefox for their usual browsing) – then they only see flash when they’ve chosen actively to view the page in the other browser.

For many people (including me) the a priori value of a random blog post or news story is less than the cost of the potential of being faced with annoying, offensive or malicious advertising, so I block all ads by default and then only whitelist sites when I have a good reason to do so.

The problem is the advertising, not the users. When I watch commercial TV in the UK I can be sure that the advertising I am exposed to will be limited in time, frequency and content, so I’m prepared to put up with it. If online advertisers were better at self-regulation then the need for adblockers would be virtually eliminated.

Here is my problem. I never block ads, but I get random ads like this on popular video websites…

What is this? This is a shockwave video that will play aproximately 100% louder then whatever video I am currently watching. Will I block ads? In this case yes. If the ad was simply a flashy moving one I wouldnt care, I would even look at it. But with this I MUST have a trigger finger on the mute button… or disable pretty much all plug-ins except the one I am using.

Hey Bill – I just added your site to my ad-blocker’s whitelist, but I still can’t see any ads. Are you even running any on this site?

My reasons for running an ad-blocker are similar to those that previously commented. Intrusive (full screen), annoying (flashing), and creepy (ads that follow me) are my three main reasons for running an ad-blocker. I only recently started to use one and after a while I forgot about it and then the web became a much more enjoyable place.